


The House on Geldstraat

by tamilprongspotter



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jan Van Eck's Bad Parenting, M/M, Objectively Bad Father Figures, Therapeutic House Cleaning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-09 02:06:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13471422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamilprongspotter/pseuds/tamilprongspotter
Summary: Wylan lets his children finger paint and doesn’t scold them if colors find their ways onto walls or floors. He lets them dig holes in the barely there strip of grass behind the house, planted simply so that his father could claim they had a lawn. He lets them run and scream and have the life he never had, too hemmed in by a strange soup of sorrow and fear, pulling his own head underwater for the crime of existing.





	The House on Geldstraat

The house on Geldstraat shines, these days.

There are lights of all colors in the windows, children’s clumsy drawings posted up all over the walls where documents and maps and stuffy paintings had once hung. It doesn’t resemble the ancient mausoleum of Wylan’s childhood, a monument to Jan Van Eck and all the Van Ecks that had come before, with nothing of Wylan’s to mark it.

Wylan lets his children finger paint and doesn’t scold them if colors find their ways onto walls or floors. He lets them dig holes in the barely there strip of grass behind the house, planted simply so that his father could claim they had a lawn. He lets them run and scream and have the life he never had, too hemmed in by a strange soup of sorrow and fear, pulling his own head underwater for the crime of existing.

“You’re a good dad.” Jes whispers, late at night, once the children are all asleep. “You’re doing a good job.”

Jes has Colm to look up to, and so do the children, but Wylan is still scared, all these years later, that some piece of his father lurks within him. Some dirty, rotten shard of misguided intention that will lodge itself into the hearts of his children and open a wound that will fester forever to match the one in Wylan’s chest. Even his mother, who spends every lucid moment trying to make up for the years of his life his father stole from her, fails to convince him, sometimes, that he is her son despite his father’s chin, despite his eyes, despite everything but his hair screaming his father’s name.

He feels his inheritance sometimes, in the quiet moments, when Jes and the children and his mother are otherwise occupied. In the silence, it creeps forward, with its head bowed in false supplication, reminding him how he came to his birthright – through lies and deception, through years of disappointment and ineptitude overwritten by a few seconds of clever trickery. 

Had it been his birthright to claim at all? 

Or would Alys’ child have been better suited to the task?

The house on Geldstraat is bright again but all the lights in the world cannot save Wylan from himself sometimes.

“I know. I know I’m doing my best.” He tells Jesper, who frowns, grip tightening just slightly on Wylan’s shoulders.

Jesper does everything with no reservations, throws himself wholly into every opportunity that falls into his lap, and Wylan counts himself lucky every day that Jesper has come to him. That Jesper has chosen him to come home to every night and while away the hours between the children’s bedtimes and sunrise with, warm in their bed. Against all logic, Wylan feels safe here. He feels untouchable, here in his childhood bedroom, with Jes practically wrapped around him.

No one sleeps in the master bedroom.

It has been empty for years, and it will stay empty if Wylan has anything to say about it.

* * *

Wylan wears happiness like a hand knitted sweater these days, one that shrinks and stretches as if it has a mind of its own. He lets it envelop him entirely in its warmth and security, as he pretends not to notice the gunshots downstairs, each little blast followed by the sound of shattering ceramic. It is useful, having a husband who loves the release of destruction as much as he loves putting things back together. It makes living in a museum, in a monument to a man who cared nothing for him, so much easier. 

Jes knits everything back together, twines the threads of fate and happiness and life together into this sweet, soft thing they have made together, this little world they have carved out of the darkness of Jan Van Eck’s legacy. This piece of it that they have salvaged, repainted, and loved to bits.

This piece that is theirs. 

“Sorry!” A little voice yells, just loudly enough to be heard through the floorboards, after a particularly loud noise.

Wylan pauses, halfway through dusting off a lamp he’d found in the attic. The shade is patterned in soft pastels, bright, sweet colors for the child that Jesper is currently teaching to treat the Van Eck name with as little care as it had treated Wylan, a lesson he had never quite learned himself. There are no mourners and no funerals in this house, and perhaps no reverence shouldn’t have been the next step, but it felt comfortable. It felt better than pretending the world hadn’t come crashing down on all of them – Wylan, Jesper, Kaz, Inej, Nina, and Matthias, who it still hurt to think about sometimes – and that his father had been to blame.

Another bang echoes through the lower floor, and Wylan smiles. Another useless relic put to death. Another old story ended.

Maybe there is a little more room for redemption in this house.

* * *

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Jes asks. 

His hands are at his sides, as if some invisible bond holds them there, tied somehow to his waist. He looks like Kaz, in that second, in a way that stretches beyond physical resemblance -- restraint, somehow, is swallowing Jesper whole in a way that does not become him. Is this what worry looks like on Jesper’s face?

Whatever it is, Wylan could go the rest of his life without seeing it again.

“Yeah.” Wylan says, supporting his weak, weary affirmation with the strongest nod he can manage. 

It is the perfect time, objectively, to do this. The children are with Kaz and Inej, being taught all kinds of ridiculous card tricks that they’d try to use on their fathers over dinner, unaware that Wylan and Jesper knew more than they would ever let on. His mother is meeting with some old friends she’s been reconnecting with. The house is empty, save for them.

It is the perfect time, logically, to open the last of Jan Van Eck’s footholds in this home. It is the perfect time to erase him completely, to forget he had ever existed (as much as possible) and finally move on. It should be the perfect time, but as Wylan’s fingers close around the brass doorknob, dusty from disuse, he feels like an intruder, like he is doing something wrong. A familiar hot rush of shame has him burning up from head to toe, his cheeks as red as his hair.

He never came here unless he’d done something wrong.

Maybe that’s why it still felt like trespassing.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do this.” Wylan says, even more determined to finish this once and for all, to break whatever hold this room had on him. “Let’s finish this.”

“We don’t need to do this now.”

“We do.” Wylan says curtly, and throws the door open.

Everything in the room is moth-eaten and streaked with dust, but, save for little touches of Alys around the room, it is just as Wylan remembers -- his father’s pile of books on his bedside table, the reading glasses he pretended he didn’t need perched on top of them. Wylan is seized, suddenly, by the thought that he has spent more of his life avoiding this room than running toward it. Shouldn’t he have felt safe here? Shouldn’t he have made himself a little second home here, inhabited this space as fully as he had his own room?

When his mother had left (not died, he is still editing his own memories to reflect that years upon years after finding her), that had all disappeared. Wylan had made it disappear, had failed and failed and failed, and that had been the last straw. Perhaps his father had thought he’d wither away without his mother, for want of love, for want of affection, and Wylan knew, in the deepest, darkest part of him, that some parts of him had. Some parts of himself felt missing, like memories he couldn’t reach, butterflies flitting just beyond his fingers. 

“Shall we?” He asks, trying to sound brave. He reaches out for Jesper, a quick brush of their fingers to steel his soul, and picks up the pile of books. 

His father’s glasses fall off and drop to the floor, and Wylan crushes them with his shoe, smiling as the glass shatters.

“Hey!” Jesper yelps. “I could’ve used those.”

“Like hell you would’ve.” Wylan fires back, and marches up to the study with the books in hand, shoving them haphazardly by other books of the same color. His father had always prided on having his books arranged so precisely, and it felt like rebellion to do whatever he wanted. 

Maybe this “no reverence” thing Jes had thought up wasn’t so bad at all.

Wylan returns to the doorway, courage ticking away like seconds on a bomb’s timer, but all the urgency melts away when he sees Jesper carefully wrapping little blown glass ornaments that must’ve belonged to Alys in brown paper, placing them in a box Wylan hadn’t noticed him bring in. Jes looks up from his work, a soft smile on his face that Wylan doubts anyone but he and their children have seen.

“How did you survive this?” He asks, every word gentle and sweet, washing over Wylan like the apple syrup Jes loved soaking his waffles in. “I mean, I tried not to think about it too much, but-- this feels like a fucking cave. No place to raise a kid in, until we made it one.”

“I don’t know.” Wylan admits, something he has been afraid to do for years. But somehow, standing in this room, tearing out the last bits of rot in this house, he feels a rush of courage that wipes away all the shame and the misery and the terror this room and the man who slept here years and years and years ago carved into him like tattoos. “I don’t know how I did it, but I did, and I’m not letting him take credit for it.”

Jesper stands after packing away the ornament in his hands and crosses the room to Wylan, pulling him into an embrace. 

“Yeah.” He says, nudging the top of Wylan’s head with the sharp line of his jaw. “I’m glad you did.”

“Me too.” Wylan says, and they stand there for longer than they should, holding each other in an act of pure defiance, before throwing the windows open so they can properly hack apart the bed and piss off all of their neighbors some more.

“Shall we take it out back and burn it?” Jes jokes, eyes alight with the mischief that Wylan had fallen so hard for.

“The mattress, absolutely. The frame might still be nice. Who knows how tall these kids are going to get?” Wylan finds himself laughing at the thought of his children growing up, of seeing them age with nothing but hope and joy in his heart, resentment touching nothing of who they are. He can do this. He can be better than his father could’ve ever dreamed. “What if we moved in here?”

“What do you mean?” 

“Let’s make new memories in here. Better ones.” The words spill forth from Wylan’s mouth like a fountain. “I just-- I think we can fix this place.”

“If you’re sure you can do it.” Jes says, searching Wylan’s eyes for an answer, for the truth.

“I think it needs a lot of scrubbing and some new paint, so we’ll be in my old room for a while yet.” Wylan says, surveying the mess before him. “But we can give this place a new life. Bet it needs a good owner anyway.”

It took him seconds to blow up his father’s legacy. He can take on a few childhood memories and come out swinging. 

He sees the room before him in his mind’s eye, made anew with fresh furniture from the little shop down the street, and new sheets, and bright, sunshine colored walls. He can see his children running in on lazy mornings, throwing themselves into every inch of free space, curling around him and Jesper as they recount every second of their dreams from the night before, little voices rising and falling in a chorus angels couldn’t dare to recreate. 

“I think I know a guy.” Jes says.

“I think I know another one.” Wylan winks. “Don’t know if he’s fond of staying on the right side of the law though.”

“Ah, maybe they’ll move in together anyway.” Jes grins, a white flash of teeth against his lips, and Wylan would kiss him if they weren’t both covered in dust and dirt. “Start a family. Change their ways or something.”

“Maybe they will.” Wylan smiles. “We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

“Good thing we don’t need glasses.”

“Yeah.” Wylan laughs, and neatly frees the mattress of its sheets before dragging it to the doorway and pushing it as far down the hall as he can. It feels like a test of strength. 

He thinks he’s passed.

Jesper comes through the doorway and stands behind him, hands resting on his shoulders, and Wylan thinks nothing of how his shirt will be stained.

“I’m so proud of you.” He whispers into Wylan’s ear, pressing a kiss right under the lobe like a promise. “We’re doing it, and maybe we’re not done, but a little early celebration isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

“I’m proud of me too.” Wylan turns to face Jesper, a new lightness in his heart. “We might need to be quick with the celebration, though.”

“Why?”

“Can’t you hear it?” Wylan points upward, just in time to catch the soft pitter patter of footsteps just above their heads. “I can’t believe it. Inej is teaching them how roofs work. Now we’ll be chasing them on and above ground.”

“Damn.” Jesper shakes his head, as the front door is nearly beaten to death by eager fists. “One more thing to thank Kaz for.” He moves to close the bedroom door, and Wylan shakes his head.

“Let it stay open.” He says.

“And if the kids go in?”

“Then I tell them who used to live there.”

“You’re a brave man, Wylan Fahey.” Jesper plants a kiss on Wylan’s forehead, then another on his lips.

The knocking on the door grows more insistent.

“I try my best.” Wylan scares up a smile, just for Jesper, and makes his way downstairs as loudly as he can. “We’re coming! Don’t break the door down! We haven’t got that much money!”

It feels like a beginning.

It feels like freedom.

As Inej and Kaz and Nina, who they must’ve found along the way, tumble in along with Wylan and Jesper’s children, the house on Geldstraat is bright and alive. There will be no darkness in it anymore, no locked rooms or memories to tiptoe around. There will be only hope and light and open windows (but only when the streets don’t smell). There will be songs before bedtime and more drawings for the walls and laughter that shakes the walls.

Wylan can change this house.

He can make it his once and for all -- all of it, not just the pretty parts.

The house on Geldstraat shines, these days, and Wylan, surrounded by everyone he loves and freed from the burden of memory, does too.


End file.
